Relations with the Central Committee were at an all-time low and getting worse by the day. Later that month, it was announced that Newton and his entourage would be traveling east to speak at a large Panther rally in New Haven, Connecticut, in support of party chairman Bobby Seale, who was about to go on trial for his alleged involvement in the murder of Panther Alex Rackley.
Even before Newton arrived on the East Coast, rumors were swirling. Dhoruba and his people had a well-placed spy in the Newton camp: Cetewayo’s wife, Connie Matthews, was Newton’s secretary. Newton himself had instructed Cetewayo to marry Connie Matthews, who was a Jamaican national in danger of being deported. But Newton was also sleeping with Matthews, who was elegant and attractive. He hadn’t anticipated that Connie would eventually fall in love with her own husband.
Matthews was becoming increasingly concerned about Huey’s erratic behavior. He had begun to refer to himself as supreme commander and was having delusions of grandeur. High on cocaine much of the time, Huey walked around in his office and apartment brandishing a gun, and he railed frequently against the New York Panthers, especially Dhoruba, whom he referred to as “a murder mouth.” Connie Matthews wanted out, but she was being held captive by Newton, who rarely let her out of his sight and had her followed by fellow Panthers when he did.
A few days before Newton arrived in New York, Connie managed to get a message out to Cetewayo, who immediately met with Dhoruba.
“You know,” Cetewayo told Dhoruba, “Huey and his crew are coming out here to whack our ass. He believes that the Twenty-one, when he comes out here to show his support for Chairman Bobby, we wanna take him out, that he’s being threatened, that his leadership is being threatened, and that you are behind all this.”
“How you know this shit?” asked Dhoruba.
“Connie. That’s why he’s not letting Connie out of his sight. And he won’t let me near her no more.”
What Cetewayo and Dhoruba didn’t know was that, at the same time, COINTELPRO agents had sent a fraudulent letter from an anonymous “Panther cadre” to Huey Newton’s brother, Melvin, alleging that a hit squad led by Dhoruba was preparing to assassinate Huey when he arrived in New York. Melvin Newton showed the letter to Huey and said, “Don’t go to New York. They’re gonna try to kill you.”
“I have to go,” said Huey. “Chairman Bobby needs us.”
Huey had plans of his own. When he returned from the East Coast, the threat to his leadership among the New York Panthers would be eliminated, one way or another.
Along with Cetewayo, Dhoruba’s inner circle included Eddie “Jamal” Joseph, an eighteen-year-old Panther who looked up to Dhoruba like an older brother. At a Panther pad in Harlem, the three talked strategy with Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird. The group was in constant contact with their fellow Panther Twenty-one defendants. Having been purged from the party they’d given their freedom to support, Lumumba Shakur and his codefendants wanted revenge; they wanted the New York Panthers to strike first and kill Huey P. Newton.
Remembered Dhoruba:
This was some heavy shit. A couple years earlier Huey was one of my heroes. Cetewayo used to come to the Panther Twenty-one trial wearing a T-shirt with Huey’s picture on the front. But now…well, first of all, there was a conscious decision made by all of us on the street that no one would try to assassinate or eliminate Huey P. Newton. Because after Malcolm X, after Martin Luther King Jr.—all our leaders—for Huey to go out like that would have been tragic for us and for what the Black Panther Party was supposed to stand for. So Huey survived us; he was off-limits. We weren’t off-limits to him, but he was off-limits to us.
Dhoruba and his group resolved to try one last time to reason with Huey, to get him to agree to some sort of monitoring system to prevent further funds from being embezzled from the Panther Twenty-one Defense Committee. They also wanted to address the issue of national representation. As Dhoruba recalled, “Most folks [in New York] wanted Huey and them to understand that we weren’t talking about challenging national leadership; we were talking about having national leadership that was truly national, a Central Committee that was represented by leaders from chapters around the country.” If Newton refused to listen, Dhoruba and the others decided to enlist the help of Connie Matthews, an ally. As cosigner of the party’s legal entity, Stronghold LTD, Matthews had the authority to sign checks and distribute funds. She also had in her possession ledgers and documents that could prove that the Committee to Defend the Panther Twenty-one was being fleeced by Huey P. Newton.
When Newton arrived in New Haven to speak at the rally, held on the campus of Yale University, he was infuriated to find that his local security team was composed of New York Panthers. His paranoia kicking in, he had his people call Boston and send down a contingent of bodyguards with no connection to the New York chapter.
After he gave his speech and retired to his hotel room, Dhoruba and Cetewayo were allowed through security to speak with Newton. What they witnessed was not encouraging. There were decanters of cognac and lines of cocaine on the coffee table, and marijuana smoke wafted in the air. Newton’s entire entourage was high. Two or three young women had been brought from the rally to entertain Newton and his bodyguards. “They were all coked out, zonked out, and they had some freaks up there,” Dhoruba remembered. The supreme commander was in no position to have a coherent conversation, much less make important decisions about party matters. Cetewayo and Dhoruba left the room.
The moment had arrived. Inside the room, Connie Matthews told Huey and his crew that she was going to take a shower. While they were preoccupied, she gathered some Panther financial ledgers, disappeared into the bathroom, and locked the door. She turned on the shower loud enough to be heard in the other room, then opened the bathroom window and climbed out onto a fire escape. She scurried down the metal stairs to a car where Dhoruba, Cetewayo, and Jamal Joseph were waiting.
The renegade Panthers drove north, and kept driving until they crossed the Canadian border. Cetewayo and Connie hopped a plane into exile in Algeria; they never returned to the United States. Dhoruba and Jamal went underground, first in Canada and then to various locations around the States.
On the morning of Monday, February 8, Dhoruba and Cetewayo failed to show up for court at 100 Centre Street. Judge Murtagh issued a warrant for their arrest, effective immediately. Bail was immediately revoked for Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur, who was four months pregnant at the time, and the Panther Twenty-one trial was temporarily suspended.
In the days that followed, Huey Newton issued a statement, which was mimeographed and distributed to Panther supporters outside the criminal court building and later published in the Black Panther. Newton proclaimed Dhoruba and Cetewayo to be “enemies of the people” for “disappearing” from the trial and giving new life to the government’s “dying case.” All of the renegade Panthers were purged from the party.
The mood in the Panther universe shifted from dismay to anger and, finally, paranoia. Rumors of hit men heading east and west to exact revenge swirled in the air. James Brown’s hit song “The Payback” seemed to capture the mood:
Hey! Gotta gotta get back (the big payback)
Revenge! I’m mad (the big payback)
Got to get back! Need some get back!! Payback! (the big payback)
That’s it!! Payback!! Revenge!! / I’m mad!!
One month after Dhoruba and the others jumped bail, the festering tensions within the party were finally expressed through the barrel of a gun.
On 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem, a Panther named Robert Webb surfaced from underground. After Newton expelled Dhoruba and the others, calling them enemies of the people, most of those closely aligned with the New York Panthers were afraid for their lives. Webb, twenty-two, was close to Dhoruba, often serving as a bodyguard for him at Panther speaking engagements around the country. As part of what COINTELPRO files routinely referred to as “the Cleaver faction” of the party, Webb had been advised to lie low until the he
at blew over.
What caused Webb to surface was that he heard the Black Panther was being sold in Harlem. The newspaper had become a symbolic flashpoint in the split between the Newton and Cleaver factions of the party; the New York Panthers had even begun publishing a paper of their own, called Right On! The original Oakland paper, the Black Panther, had slowly disappeared from New York streets.
On the afternoon of March 8, Webb confronted a group of Panthers, loyal to Newton, who were selling the Black Panther on New York Panther turf. In retrospect, the operation may have been a trap to lure the New York Panthers, who were in hiding, into the light of day. Webb was ambushed, shot multiple times. He died in the gutter on 125th Street, not far from the Apollo Theater, where the masses had gathered eight years earlier and boarded buses to the nation’s capital to hear Martin Luther King speak.
According to Dhoruba, “That crew who killed Webb were some boys from Boston and a Panther from the Midwest by the name of Redwine. That’s the same crew who was supposed to kill me and Cetewayo. When Robert resurfaced, he became a target of opportunity. They took him out.”
The war over black liberation had become a war of Panthers killing Panthers.
[ sixteen ]
PANTHER JUSTICE
THE NYPD KEPT its collective eye on the Black Panther Party. Though the New York chapter had been torn asunder by the debilitating and long-running Panther Twenty-one trial and the FBI’s COINTELPRO initiative, the agents of BOSS continued filing their daily reports of the coming apocalypse. This on October 29, 1970, from the commanding officer of Special Services to the chief inspector:
It has been reported [via confidential informant] that the BPP has made a policy decision to examine the drug situation in the inner city in order to determine which police officials are receiving “kick-backs” for “looking the other way” while the drug traffic flourishes. These officials will then be systematically murdered. The Black Panther Party will quietly take credit for the activity. The operation is ostensibly intended to eliminate some of the black ghetto’s drug problem; gain the sympathy and financial backing of both blacks and whites; terrorize elements of the Mafia and the syndicate; and force the police to clean up the drug problem. It is hoped that a byproduct of the activity will be a substantial increase in the number of youths who will join the BPP…. The first murders of “bad cops” are planned for the Harlem section of New York City.
The BOSS memos were starting to read like something out of a blaxploitation movie—Shaft meets Superfly by way of Black Caesar. Never mind that the organizational structure of the Panthers in the city was in disarray. A wounded panther was dangerous and unpredictable, capable of lashing out in an irrational manner.
Of all the party initiatives that troubled the NYPD, one that received copious attention in the BOSS files was the call for community oversight and decentralization of the police—an approach known as “community policing.” In a petition circulated to protesters at rallies outside the Criminal Court building during the Panther Twenty-one trial, the party called for a police control amendment to be added to the city charter:
This amendment would give control of the police to community-elected neighborhood councils so that those whom the police should serve will be able to set police policy and standards of conduct…. The councils shall have the power to discipline officers for breach of department policy or violations of the law. (Against the people.) They may direct their police commissioner to make changes in department-wide policy by majority vote of the said department commissioner. The council can recall a commissioner appointed by it at any time it finds that he is no longer responsive to the community. The community can recall the council members when they are not responsive to it.
The notion of community control of the police seemed democratic on the face of it, but the Panthers knew full well that what they were calling for flew in the face of historical precedent in New York and virtually every other major city in the United States. In general, urban police departments had been formed by the property-owning class to protect their assets. A police officer could shoot a looter during a riot situation and know he would be exonerated because many municipalities had determined—unofficially, and in selected situations—that property was more valuable than human life. By the late 1940s and into the 1950s, with the great migration of southern blacks to the northern cities, this dynamic took on a racial cast.
Some Black Panther Party leaders—Huey Newton in particular—had tried to make the argument that the police were mere tools of the ruling class. In New York City, after all, real estate concerns were a primary force behind racial segregation. Real estate money was invariably behind the election of politicians, and the development of property determined where city resources were focused. The fact that the city was so densely populated, with a rich neighborhood like the Upper East Side just blocks away from a poor neighborhood like East Harlem, required the police to man the barricades with due diligence; they were the first and the last line of defense.
The argument that the police were being used by larger capitalist forces may have had some merit, but it was also a Marxist analysis that fell on deaf ears. Cops weren’t interested in being portrayed as “instruments of the white power structure.” And for black citizens living in impoverished communities, the theoretical reasons behind police brutality were less interesting than the reality of a nightstick across the skull.
Community policing was an attempt to alter the priorities of law enforcement, to remove them from the influences and pressures of the city’s larger economic structure and put it in the hands of the people. To dismiss this as utopian or Marxist was beside the point. The vanguard of the BPP was calling for revolution, not social reform.
To the cops, community policing reminded them of the mock trials that the Panthers had instituted to call attention to police actions they felt were beyond the pale. One such “tribunal” took place at the Marcy Housing Projects in Brooklyn, where a “legal proceeding” was held to determine the guilt or innocence of Patrolman Thomas Johnson, shield number 2420, who had shot and killed a local teenager on Flushing Avenue during an arrest gone bad.
As noted in a BOSS confidential memo, “The trial procedure included a judge, jury, prosecutor, and defense attorney. The members of the jury were made up of persons of the community and members of the BPP, who in addition, formed a security detail to physically search all persons wishing to gain access to the proceedings…. Information gained from another source reveals that Ptl. Johnson was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by the Black Panther Party. No mention was made of any planned action to enforce this judgment.”
Access to BOSS files was restricted, but information leaked out, creating a rumor mill through which legitimate threats, hypothetical possibilities, and police paranoia were disseminated into the community. When it came to the subject of community policing, most cops were worried less about mock trials than about the very real possibility that the department’s deeply engrained corruption might soon be dragged into the light of day.
Bill Phillips was aware of the possibilities. By early 1971, he had moved most of his hustling activities out of the ghetto, where operations like the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) were skimming narcotics profits in places like Harlem on a scale beyond anything Phillips had ever attempted. SIU was a virtual rogue unit within the department, relatively unmonitored by the NYPD command structure or anyone else.
Sensing, perhaps, that the level of graft in the narcotics age had skyrocketed, Phillips narrowed his own reach, focusing on the tried-and-true scams he knew best. He confined himself mostly to midtown Manhattan on the East Side, home of the Seventeenth Precinct. Payoffs from bars, nightclubs, construction sites, and gambling operations were still the best moneymakers, but like any veteran hustler, Phillips was always on the lookout for new scores.
One night in early April, he was having a drink at P.J. Clarke’s, where everyone still thought he was a detective, when another co
p—this one an actual detective—pulled him aside and excitedly told him of a potential score. Just a few blocks away, on East Fifty-fifth Street near Madison Avenue, a high-class madam was running a prostitution operation. Having been busted a week earlier, she was now looking for a cop who could put her on the pad in exchange for protection.
The words of his father rang in Phillips’s ears: prostitution, like dope, was usually more trouble than it was worth. But Pop was dead now. Money was money. Who was Bill Phillips to say no to a potential score?
Phillips and the other cop left Clarke’s and walked over to the whorehouse in an apartment building at 155 East Fifty-fifth Street. It was an immaculate building with a doorman, and the madam running the place was a class act. Her name was Xaviera Hollander. She was a Dutch immigrant, blond, blue-eyed, a professional hooker and serious businesswoman at the age of thirty-five.
Phillips introduced himself. At first, Hollander doubted he really was a cop; she’d been ripped off before by fake cops. Phillips gave her his badge and department ID number. “So,” he said, “I heard you’ve been having problems and are looking for someone who can make them go away.”
Hollander told him the story of the recent bust at her place. She and her girls had been taken downtown and thrown in the Tombs like common criminals. She described to Phillips how they were leered at by predatory Negro junkie streetwalkers. Years later, in a published memoir, Hollander put it like this: “Almost from the moment we were herded into the crowded cattle pen of a prison cell…the jail-toughened black hookers gave us nothing but misery. ‘Hey, bigshit madambitch, bet you ain’t got no black cunt turnin’ tricks in your high-class fuckin’ house!’…In the hooker hierarchy, we were the aristocrats, they were the serfs, and jail, by God, was the great leveler. I stood with my girls huddled together against the cell bars, putting as much distance as possible between us and the black streetwalkers.”
The Savage City Page 37